NAZI HOLOCAUST
Selection at Auschwitz, 1944. Source: bpk, Berlin / Auschwitz, Poland / Art Resource, NY.
On September 28, 1941, posters ordered “all Jews living in the city of Kiev” to gather the next day, ostensibly for resettlement. In retribution for the sabotage killing of German officers, the SS forced the remaining Jews in the Ukrainian capital to march to the edge of the city, verify their identity, give up their valuables, and take off their clothes. Members of Einsatzgruppe C, made up of German security police, SS troops, and Ukrainian auxiliaries, led them in groups of ten to the edge of a ravine and shot them, dumping their bodies below. Surprised by the large number of victims (33,761), the executioners continued to kill for thirty-six hours, murdering “all of them, without exception—old people, women and children.” Only twenty-nine individuals, including Dina Pronicheva, managed to escape and tell about the slaughter, though photos taken by guards also attest to its gruesome reality. In a moving poem and a somber symphony, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Dimitri Shostakovich sought to preserve the memory of this massacre. As one of the largest killings, Babi Yar has become emblematic of the initial “holocaust by bullets.”1
Inspired by increasing ethical concerns, the concept of the Holocaust has come to represent the Nazis’ Judeocide during the past several decades. Especially in the United States this approach has filled the need to honor the memory of survivors, support the state of Israel, and sidestep the guilt of not having accepted enough refugees. Precisely because the mass murder did not take place in North America, intellectuals could elevate it into a generalized secular standard of inhumanity by linking it to Raphael Lemkin’s neologism of genocide. Though it took an entire generation to end the postwar silence, the Holocaust perspective thereafter quickly institutionalized itself through the founding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the establishment of numerous chairs in Holocaust studies at universities. This proliferation has also swept away the stubborn remnants of right-wing Holocaust denial. While the Holocaust sensibility has provided an effective bar against forgetting, its penchant for metahistorical moralizing has also tended to place its stylized narrative of good and evil beyond human understanding.2
A more historical approach instead recontextualizes the genocide in Eastern Europe by emphasizing the antimodern modernity of the ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, and war of annihilation. The orgy of mass killing was part of a broader project of racial imperialism that intended to conquer space for agrarian settlement. In practice, that social Darwinist aim meant that the local Poles, Ukrainians, and Belarusians needed to be forcibly evicted or reduced to slavery to make place for Aryan farmers. Widespread anti-Slavic prejudice among Germans made this policy popular, since it appealed to a sense of superiority and satisfied an expectation that the spread of their Kultur would colonize the inferior East. Moreover, it promised that new resources such as Ukrainian grain and Caucasus oil would enable the Third Reich to compete in future struggles on a global scale. Millions of Jews were, however, in the way, since their pale of settlement was precisely that area in eastern Poland and western Russia that the Nazis hoped to conquer.3 The systematic mass murder was therefore part of a project of creating an Aryan racial empire.
This spatial imperialism was compounded by a peculiarly modern form of anti-Semitism. Such prejudices had deep roots in a Christianity that charged the Jews with the killing of Christ, with ritual murder, and with usurious greed. But emancipation had removed the legal constraints of the ghetto, allowing the Jewish minority to enter professions beyond money lending. Their relative success in medicine, law, or journalism and their ostentatious accumulation of wealth spurred widespread envy among a radical fringe of Christian competitors. The crucial shift in rhetoric was the pseudoscientific basis of a new racism that claimed a fundamental biological difference that could not be erased by conversion or secularization, trapping Jews forever in otherness. Holding them responsible for the ills of modern civilization, the new Judeophobia clamored for their expulsion. Not a generalized “eliminationist anti-Semitism” but rather Hitler’s obsession and the Nazi seizure of power propelled the escalation from social discrimination to physical genocide.4
The ideological war of annihilation between National Socialism and communism rendered ethnic cleansing and racist murder possible in practice. By removing diplomatic and moral constraints and abolishing the distinction between combatants and civilians, the murderous modernity of warfare on the eastern front facilitated the implementation of racial genocide. For each side, Nazis or Bolsheviks, those on the other side were the key enemy to whom no quarter was to be given. Moreover, the policies of “scorched earth” to deny the conqueror any resources and of “living off the land” so as not to overburden supply lines unleashed waves of destruction that eliminated the very resources from which the survivors would have to live, precipitating hunger and disease. The Jews and Slavs of the “bloodlands” had the misfortune to be caught in this ideological clash, changing their rulers from Soviets to Nazis and back, depending on military fortunes.5 The unprecedented brutality of this struggle inevitably led to an abandonment of moral limits and civilized restraints—showing modernity’s cruelest face.
NAZI WAR AIMS
By the summer of 1941 Hitler had reached the zenith of his power, allowing him to announce ever more openly the aims for which he had launched the Second World War. In the pace of eight short years he had thrown off the onerous restrictions of Versailles, managed to reunite most German speakers such as Austrians, Sudeten Germans, and West Prussians in the Greater Reich, and established hegemony over the European continent by conquering Poland, Scandinavia, France, and the Balkans while seeming to be on the verge of defeating Soviet Russia as well. Adherents of traditional Realpolitik among the elites were astounded by this strengthening of Germany’s international position. Even radical nationalists like the Pan-Germans had to acknowledge that virtually all their aims had been achieved. And yet the Führer was not content with consolidating such signal successes; he interpreted them only as the springboard for ever greater efforts. Transcending conventional hegemony, these ideological aims continued to drive the Nazis onward and made the war even more murderous.6
For Hitler the central purpose of the conflict was “expansion of living space in the East” in order to stabilize control over the continent and enable the Reich to compete on equal terms in world politics. Considering Germany a continental power, he was skeptical of overseas possessions and preferred instead to colonize the Slavic East, since he considered the Western European countries too firmly established. In a way, this project sought to resume a mythical Drang nach Osten, celebrated in Prussian fiction and history, which glorified the Teutonic Knights as carriers of Christianity and law. The lure of living space also built on the visions of the Baltic Germans, who sought the Reich’s support against the more numerous Russians and Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians. During the First World War the German army under Ludendorff had already controlled vast stretches of Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine, only to withdraw as a consequence of its defeat in the West.7 Conquering and colonizing the agrarian East would broaden the resource base Germany would need for the global competition against world powers like the United States and Russia.
Sharpened by decades of fierce struggles between nationalities, Nazi colonization took a more radical form than conventional conquest and occupation, aiming at nothing less than a reversal of ethnic balances. Skeptical of the value of industrial production, Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Walter Darré considered agrarian settlement the source of national power, envisaging a belt of German farm villages running all the way to the Crimea. This gigantic Umvolkung project sought to collect all dispersed ethnic Germans from the East so as to resettle them in West Prussia and the Warthegau, thereby re-Germanizing these ethnically disputed territories. However, shifting the demographic composition required the removal of the current inhabitants, such as Poles and Jews, by means of ruthless ethnic cleansing to create room for German colonists. Safeguarding Aryan racial domination moreover necessitated the systematic killing of Slavic elites so as to reduce the rest to passive slave laborers, incapable of resisting their conquerors. Using force rather than assimilation, this social-engineering project proceeded with frightening brutality.8
A related biopolitical aim was the “solution of the Jewish question” in order to remove an influence that Nazi leaders held responsible for the cultural and social degeneration of modernity. Though building on a tradition of religious anti-Semitism, the secular version of Judeophobia was a product of the emancipation that had brought civil equality to Jews in Central Europe.9 During the financial crisis of the early 1870s, critics like Heinrich von Treitschke had attributed the crash to unscrupulous Jewish speculators, while cultural pessimists like Julius Langbehn accused the Jews of undermining German Kultur. In the universities nationalist students in the Vereine Deutscher Studenten raised the anti-Semitic banner, spreading prejudice among future professionals.10 Nevertheless, the efforts of agitators like Otto Böckel to found an anti-Jewish party failed owing to the resistance of assimilated Jews in the Centralverein (a civil-rights group) and of liberal Germans in parties of the Left. But once concocted, the anti-Semitic poison spread to ever wider circles, making Judeophobia socially acceptable.
Anti-Semitism did not put the Nazis in power, but their control of the government removed all restraints to pursuing Judeophobic policies in Germany. No doubt radical hatred of Jews was one of the attractions for many Old Fighters who joined the fledgling Nazi movement in the early 1920s. One of the worst, the Franconian Julius Streicher, edited an anti-Semitic sheet full of pornographic cartoons of lurid Jewish men defiling innocent Aryan girls. Another rabid racist was the agronomist Heinrich Himmler, who organized the Schutzstaffel (SS) as an ideological elite within the paramilitary thugs of the SA.11 Though many Germans disliked the crudeness of anti-Semitism, the seizure of power allowed the Nazis to spew hate phrases, boycott Jewish stores, and assault their hapless Jewish neighbors. In the spring of 1933 the Hitler government issued a series of anti-Semitic decrees in order to purge the bureaucracy and the free professions of Jews while denying Jewish students access to higher education. Accompanied by spontaneous pogroms, these official measures sought to reverse the liberal gains of civic emancipation.12
The Second World War made it possible for Hitler and Himmler to escalate their anti-Semitic discrimination, designed to trigger emigration, into ghettoization as a prelude to mass murder. The Nazis systematically increased their pressure from the initial denial of livelihood, via the deprivation of citizenship in the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, to the physical threats in the November 9, 1938, pogrom known as the Kristallnacht (Night of Glass) because of all the broken shop windows. Forcing them to leave their possessions behind, this increasing persecution drove a quarter million German Jews, about half of the total, to emigrate, if they were lucky enough to overcome the reluctance of other countries to accept them as refugees. The Anschluss of Austria and the takeover of Czechoslovakia added several hundred thousand Jews, but the unleashing of the war soon afterward shut most doors to escape. The conquest of Poland brought several million additional eastern Jews under Nazi control, terrorized by SS violence that pushed some into Soviet territory. Their temporary confinement in urban ghettos left open the question of their ultimate fate.13
Temporarily suspended by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Hitler’s final ideological aim was the elimination of communism at home and in Russia. Like other German nationalists, the Nazis hated the Bolsheviks as defeatists who had contributed to losing the First World War and as revolutionaries who threatened national unity through class warfare. After the Reichstag fire the Gestapo focused most of its energy on suppressing communist resistance among the workers as the only serious domestic threat. Internationally, Hitler saw Stalin as a rival dictator and Bolshevism as a mass movement of comparable attraction that needed to be defeated in order to stop its subversive influence. Though the two totalitarian movements shared some characteristics, their enmity was logical because both coveted the same East European territories of the Baltic states, Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine for their imperial designs. Predicting a “clash of ideologies” in his briefing of military leaders, Hitler called for utmost brutality in the struggle against the Soviet Union, ordering the elimination of the intelligentsia and the political commissars.14
The anti-Slavic, anti-Semitic, and anticommunist phobias converged and mutually reinforced one another, leading to an unprecedented bloodbath in Eastern Europe. In the warped Nazi perception an ideological crusade was needed against the Bolsheviks, who ruled the Russian Slavs, since they were dominated by Jews. While known communists and Slavic intellectuals were to be killed, the remaining population had some chance of survival if it proved compliant and worked hard in the fields and factories. The fate of the Jews was even more horrible, since they faced complete extermination once the various plans for resettlement in Madagascar or behind the Urals had failed. Stretched for manpower, the Nazis sought to exploit local ethnic conflicts in order to mobilize auxiliaries like the Arajs commandos in Latvia and the Trawniki guards in Poland. But ultimately Hitler’s chilling vision of establishing Aryan hegemony through mass murder proved self-defeating since it did not leave any space for potential collaborators.15 While other pressure groups in Germany pushed for further war aims such as African colonies, the deadly core of the Nazi ambition lay in reshaping the East.
NEW ORDER
Military victories allowed Hitler to transform the face of Europe, imposing a mixture of German domination and Nazi ideology on the continent. In theory, everything was organized according to the Führerprinzip, the leadership principle by which authority flowed down from the top. In practice, Hitler created a series of competing domains in which Alfred Rosenberg and Himmler vied for ideological control, Hermann Göring and Fritz Todt competed for economic ascendancy, and so on. Though usually compliant, the military retained some degree of organizational and operational independence, but it had to compete with the growing Waffen-SS. Entrusted with providing security and seeing itself as the new ideological elite, Himmler’s SS created a parallel universe of concentration camps. By anticipating Hitler’s wishes, the bureaucracy as well tried to retain some degree of competence and order in a dynamic situation, while business leaders were only too happy to exploit the resources of conquered territories. As European hegemon, the Third Reich was a contradictory blend of dictatorial control and polycratic chaos.16
Like other conquerors before him, Hitler fundamentally redrew the map of Europe, surrounding Greater Germany with circles of occupied territories, allied countries, and neutrals. To begin with, the Nazis reannexed the disputed provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France, and extended Germany’s eastern borders beyond prior possessions such as Danzig, Upper Silesia, West Prussia, and Poznań to include about half of ethnic Poland, planning additional annexations after the war. While leaving South Tyrol to Mussolini, these territorial gains broadened the economic base but introduced a considerable number of non–German speakers into the Reich. Respecting the national states of Western Europe, the Nazis controlled occupied France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Norway through a mixture of military governors and civilian administrators. But in Bohemia, the government-general of Poland, the Baltics, the Ukraine, and the Balkans, Hitler instituted imperial commissars in order to rule directly from Berlin. Hence the Nazis governed occupied Europe through a confusing tangle of military and political authorities.17
Often forgotten is the significant role of allies in extending the reach of the Third Reich into areas beyond direct German control. While the touted Axis with Italy and Japan turned out to be more formidable on paper than in practice, it nonetheless spread the war into the Mediterranean and into Asia, tying down huge Allied forces to combat it. More often than not Mussolini made his own decisions and had to be bailed out by German troops. Though the Japanese military decided to settle its border disputes with Soviet Russia rather than to support the German attack, it posed a formidable threat to the colonies of Western European nations and to the United States that took years to overcome.18 On the continent Finland and the Balkan countries of Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania chose to ally themselves with Nazi Germany, partly for reasons of ideological affinity and partly for the sake of gaining territorial spoils. Finally, authoritarian puppet regimes like those of Slovakia and Croatia owed their entire existence to the destruction of the Versailles-mandated barrier states. Even the various neutral countries collaborated to a considerable extent with Berlin, facilitating German ascendancy.19
The most complicated mixture between outside control and continued independence developed in France. The northern three-fifths of the country along the Atlantic coast was occupied by the Wehrmacht as a staging area for the naval war while the rest of the free zone was governed from the spa city of Vichy, which also retained civil authority over the occupied zone. Technically, Vichy France continued to be an independent country, recognized even by the United States. After the armistice in June 1940 conservative opponents of democratic modernity in France proclaimed an authoritarian constitution, ending the Third Republic, and made the World War I hero Marshal Philippe Pétain head of state. Seeking to establish an order based on “god, family and fatherland,” his reactionary regime cooperated officially with the Third Reich so as to preserve the substance of the nation until a time when the country could become truly independent again. The British sinking of a French fleet at Mersel-Kébir facilitated Vichy’s cooperation with Berlin. In retaliation for the Allied landing in North Africa, however, the Germans occupied the free zone in November 1942, preparing to repulse an invasion by fortifying the coast and controlling the hinterland.20
Like the citizens of all other occupied nations, the French faced the difficult choice of whether to “collaborate” or resist. Unable to openly refuse orders, most apolitical Frenchmen coped with the curfews, shortages, labor conscriptions, and political restrictions as best as they could. Opportunistic businessmen could make great profits from supplying the German war machinery. But providing raw materials and finished goods for Berlin also involved Prime Minister Pierre Laval’s government in repressive, exploitative, and anti-Semitic measures. Some rightist youths were so caught up in the ideological appeals of the Nazis and attracted by the deadly romanticism of the SS that they volunteered to fight for the Third Reich. In Paris, the Francophile ambassador Otto Abetz sought to draw intellectuals like Louis-Ferdinand Céline into cultural collaboration with Germany, though the military administration instituted a draconian regime. Capitalizing on his compatriots’ disenchantment, General Charles de Gaulle’s proclamation of the Free French movement in London exile inspired a resistance movement, headed by Jean Moulin, that deeply split the country’s loyalties.21
This organizational patchwork allowed the Nazis a ruthless exploitation of resources in a Grossraumwirtschaft, an economy of large enough scale to sustain what had turned into a war of attrition from the fall of 1941 on. In defeated countries Agriculture Minister Herbert Backe’s emissaries fanned out to seize foodstuffs for supplying the German military and civilians at the expense of starvation among the defeated. Industrial giants such as the Krupp steelworks and the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben requisitioned companies and raw materials with scant regard to property rights or fair contracts in order to meet the rising production targets for weapons and ammunition. With military losses averaging fifty thousand dead per month, the dwindling supply of industrial and agricultural labor became a key bottleneck. At first workers were recruited voluntarily. But when the terrible conditions of long hours, insufficient food, and housing in camps became known, labor boss Fritz Sauckel had to use force to round up prospects, mistreating them brutally. By the end of the war the mixture of POWs and slave laborers reached a staggering 7.9 million—a crucial workforce that kept the Nazi war machinery rolling regardless of human cost.22
The domination of continental Europe was essential for continuation of the war and realization of the Nazi aims of settlement, Judeocide, and the defeat of communism. Since not even an expanded Germany was strong enough to fight against Britain, Russia, and the United States at the same time, Hitler sought to mobilize the entire continent. To make up for limitations in resources and manpower, the Wehrmacht had to exploit the raw materials, industrial production, and agricultural produce of new provinces, occupied territories, allies, and neutrals. In order to foster voluntary collaboration, the Nazis increasingly claimed to be defending “fortress Europe” against the communist menace of Bolshevik hordes, but endemic shortages of food and war matériel forced them to resort to ever more violent compulsion, which could only inspire hatred and resistance. German control of the continent modernized Europe in an exploitative form, centralizing its economic resources under the command of Berlin.23 Moreover, it emboldened Hitler to undertake the even more gigantic project of cementing German hegemony by colonizing the East.
ETHNIC CLEANSING OF SLAVS
Though the term ethnic cleansing only originated in the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, the concept accurately describes Nazi policies in Eastern Europe. Hitler aimed at nothing less than “the planned deliberate removal from a specific territory [of] persons of a particular ethnic group, by force or intimidation, in order to render that area ethnically homogeneous.” The German description of anti-Semitic policies as designed to make the country judenrein employs precisely this image of cleansing an area of Jews. Moreover, “means of murder, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, extra-judicial executions, rape and sexual assaults, confinement of civilian population in ghetto areas, forcible removal, displacement and deportation of civilian population, deliberate military attacks or threats of attacks on civilians and civilian areas, and wanton destruction of property” were employed by the SS, Wehrmacht, and local auxiliaries in Eastern Europe from 1939 on.24 Ethnic cleansing was both the aim and the method by which the Nazis wanted to eliminate the Jewish and much of the Slavic population to make room for German settlement.
The Master Plan East, a secret blueprint for Germanization sketched out in 1940, outlined the dual goal of eliminating the local inhabitants and implanting German-speaking settlers in Eastern Europe. SS bureaucrats like Hans Ehlich in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) and academics like the Berlin agronomist Konrad Meyer collaborated in the Generalplan Ost, drawing up grandiose visions of enhancing Germandom without regard for existing populations. With chilling radicalism, such concepts envisaged the removal of about forty-five million inhabitants, four-fifths of the Poles and half of the Russians, leaving the remainder as an enslaved workforce. At the same time, the plan called for the settlement of eight to ten million Germans as Wehrbauern, armed farmers, who would defend the colonial territories and absorb the Slavic natives. The conquerors would not be squeamish in the methods of removal, ranging from expulsion to the Far East to extermination for those who had nowhere to go. While some of the plan’s racist rhetoric seems fanciful, many of its policies were implemented, turning it into gruesome reality.25
The key instrument of Germanization was ethnic selection, designed to recover German blood while weeding out opponents and racial inferiors. Made official for annexed territories in 1941, this classification was called the Ethnic German List (Deutsche Volksliste), constructed by SS officials of the Reich Commissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom. On the basis of documents and interviews, ethnic Germans without citizenship were divided into four categories: (1) Volksdeutsche, who had supported the Reich; (2) Deutschstämmige, who were of ethnic descent; (3) Eingedeutschte, who needed to recover their roots; and (4) Rückgedeutschte, who were willing to become Germans. While German communists and other opponents of Nazis were mercilessly sent to concentration camps, certified ethnic brethren could count on numerous benefits such as acquiring citizenship—though the men had to serve in the military. SS officials found out that making these selections was quite difficult, as there was no firm ideological or biological basis beyond behavior and appearance. Not surprisingly most of the 2.7 million members of the list in 1944 were in the vague third category.26
The systematic decimation of the Polish elite and the persecution of Jews began not after but during the German victory over Poland. SS Einsatzgruppen moved behind the advancing Wehrmacht columns, ostensibly to secure the rear against sabotage but in fact to begin mass killing. Rhetorically, such murder was motivated by revenge for some anti-German atrocities committed by Poles, which were inflated by Nazi propaganda. In practice, the killing targeted the Polish political elite and intelligentsia, tens of thousands of whom were murdered in order to prevent any resistance. Moreover, the murders also involved Jews as racial inferiors or potential opponents. Incarceration in work camps and in ghettos prompted hundreds of thousands to flee eastward—only to be killed or imprisoned by Stalin’s henchmen. The attack on the Soviet Union extended Nazi repression to the Baltic states, Belarus, and the Ukraine, focusing especially on Communist commissars and cutting off any escape routes for Jews. Organized reprisals against partisan attacks proved a license for soldiers to retaliate against civilians without any scruples.27
More deadly yet was the starvation by neglect and design that threatened Slavic and Jewish civilians and Russian prisoners during the winter of 1941–42. To stretch the insufficient food supply, the Nazi leadership put priority on maintaining the fighting power of the Wehrmacht as well as the morale of the home front—a ruthless choice that amounted to a “hunger plan” toward the occupied population and POWs in the East. The decision to supply the troops from local resources rather than via the long transportation routes from home required extracting food by force, leaving civilian rations disastrously short of survival needs. Due to a lack of preparation and empathy, the surprisingly large number of Red Army prisoners overwhelmed the German capacity to receive, feed, and process them so that untold individuals succumbed to starvation. Moreover, during the siege of Leningrad, which lasted more than two years, the German-Finnish command used hunger as a deliberate weapon. Those weakened by insufficient nutrition were especially vulnerable to the development of epidemics like typhoid fever. Over five million civilians and POWs therefore died “a silent death” from hunger.28
Another, similarly inhumane method to further ethnic cleansing was “death through labor” under intolerable conditions. To compensate for German workers fighting and dying at the front, millions of young Poles, Jews, Russians, Belarusans, and Ukrainians were requisitioned to work in armament factories or on farms. In Himmler’s vast SS concentration-camp universe, many prisoners were forced to do heavy physical labor for scraps of food that did not suffice to keep them alive. In factories in the Reich, slave laborers sometimes encountered slightly better conditions if industrialists appreciated their skills. But weakened from malnutrition, they also perished in large numbers since they were incarcerated, compelled to labor long hours, and exposed to bombing attacks. Only if they worked on a friendly farm did they have a chance to survive. In defiance of economic logic, the slave laborers were insufficiently fed and yet expected to produce as much as comparable German workers.29 Although two-thirds of the German workforce eventually consisted of slave labor, hundreds of thousands were literally worked to death.
For all their murderous effort, the Nazis had relatively little to show in terms of successful Germanization. The SS office for the Strengthening of Germandom tried to collect ethnic Germans from language islands all over occupied Eastern Europe, for example, bringing farmers who had lived for centuries in Transnistria at the Romanian border back into the Reich. Displaced from their rural roots to an urban culture, these resettlers faced a difficult adjustment. Altogether about 867,000 ethnic Germans were thus returned to Germany proper. It was even more difficult to motivate potential settlers to take up abandoned Polish farms in West Prussia or the Warthegau, since these often did not measure up to German standards. While the Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle put out colorful brochures with smiling farmers in their new homes, the reality was disappointing since the newcomers had to cope with different crops, unfamiliar livestock, and a hostile climate. Altogether about 723,000 settlers moved to the new provinces—a far cry from expectations that had been ten times as high.30 Moreover, they were all uprooted by the Red Army in 1944–45.
It is largely forgotten that about half the victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing were Slavs killed to make room for erecting a German Empire in the East. According to one rough count, about one hundred thousand members of the Polish elite were murdered from 1939 on in order to break the back of any potential resistance. Another 4.2 million Soviet POWs as well as Russian, Belarusan, and Ukrainian civilians perished as a result of starvation during the German occupation. And finally about seven hundred thousand partisans and noncombatants were shot as reprisals for resistance against German forces in Warsaw and Belarus.31 These staggering numbers, amounting to about five million dead, do not include other civilian deaths from fighting, which ran several million more. Since the carnage occurred away from western media and most of the populations did survive, the silent deaths from hunger are less well remembered. Yet these casualties were not just collateral damage of savage fighting but rather the logical result of seeking to create a modern racist utopia by changing the nationality balance of Eastern Europe.
GENOCIDE OF JEWS
The most radical form of ethnic cleansing was the genocide of the Jews, since it aimed not just at displacing but at exterminating an entire population. Conceptualizing the memory of Judeocide, the neologism genocide, enshrined in a United Nations convention in 1948, refers to all “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The difference between the decimation of the Slavs and the genocide of the Jews lay precisely in the radicalism of the Nazi project to annihilate all Jews under their control, once there were no more avenues left for emigration or expulsion. Though discrimination and persecution had already forced half of the German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to flee, the victories over Poland, France, the Balkans, and the initial success of the attack on the Soviet Union brought approximately five million more Jews under Nazi control. While the food shortages and settlement plans encouraged harsh measures such as compulsory labor, in the end it was the biopolitical crusade to eliminate “the Jewish virus” that motivated this mass murder. The genocide therefore grew out of the ethnic cleansing but went far beyond it.32
The euthanasia program by which Nazi doctors murdered incurably ill and disabled Germans was the precedent that pioneered the genocidal killing method. Hitler authorized the “mercy death” of “life not worth living” in order to improve the composition of the Aryan race and to save labor and food during the war. In accordance with the international eugenic movement in the United States and in Sweden, the racial hygienists initially just sterilized the hereditarily ill, depriving about 330,000 Germans of the ability to reproduce. But the victory over Poland offered Nazi doctors a chance to murder the institutionalized in a program that they then extended to the Reich. Initially children and adults were killed with injections, but eventually they were gassed in vans by carbon monoxide. Medical records indicate that the T-4 program killed 70,273 individuals. Though the Nazi physicians used deception, church leaders and family members protested so loudly that Hitler stopped the killing in August 1941. But the example had been set, and some two hundred thousand more concentration-camp inmates were murdered by war’s end.33
The policy of ghettoization facilitated the subsequent murderous campaign by removing Jews from their surroundings and concentrating them within designated enclaves in Polish or Russian cities. In September 1939, Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich ordered Jews to be collected in urban centers and then shipped from Germany and Western Europe to the East, reviving a medieval practice in a more horrible way. These designated Jewish quarters were administered by local Judenräte (Jewish Councils) that played an ambiguous role both as self-defense organizations and as transmitters of Nazi orders. Living conditions in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, or Minsk, to name just a few, were simply atrocious, since hundreds of thousands of people were crammed into too little space, food rations were insufficient, and contact with the outside was barred by walls or barbed wire. In the midst of such hunger and disease, a rich personal and cultural life nonetheless flourished during this strange time, suspended between a normal past and a deadly future. For the SS, the ghettos were a convenient source of labor and a stopgap device, which indicated that the Nazis had not yet made up their mind.34
Harsher yet was the confinement in concentration camps (KZ), because it stripped the inmates of every shred of human dignity. Pioneered by the British in the Boer War, imprisonment in improvised enclosures made it possible to control large numbers of enemies. Begun with the establishment of Dachau in 1933, the system spread to Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, and beyond, imprisoning German communists and other regime opponents, gays, gypsies, and foreigners as well as ordinary criminals. Before 1939 Jews were incarcerated to prompt emigration, whereas during the war they were imprisoned to provide slave labor in quarries or underground mines to build V-2 rockets and so on. While all inmates were overworked, starved, and beaten, the Jews, identified by their yellow star, were at the bottom of the hierarchy, subject to harassment even by fellow prisoners. Eventually thousands of camps sprang up in the Reich and the occupied territories, in which human skeletons in striped garb ceaselessly toiled for their Nazi masters. No wonder that the suffering was immense and death rates were high.35
Map 7. Concentration camps, 1943–44. Solid squares represent select camps. Because of map scale, not all camps can be shown or labeled. Camps operated by German-allied or dependent states are not shown. Adapted from National Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.
The actual genocide began with the “Holocaust by bullets” in the fall of 1941, when the Nazis murdered masses of eastern Jews by conventional methods. Although the timing and content of Hitler’s order of the “final solution of the Jewish question” remain disputed, it is undeniable that the attack on the Soviet Union provided the SS with a cover to implement its anti-Semitic fantasies, initially in an improvised fashion but eventually in a quite systematic manner. In a procedure repeated hundreds of times, one of the infamous Einsatzgruppen, composed of SS, security police, and local auxiliaries, would sweep into a town, round up all the Jews it could discover, march them to a forest, force them to dig their own graves, and then execute them with individual shots or machine-gun fire. Often rear Wehrmacht units would also lend logistical help.36 A mixture of ideological conviction, group pressure, and liberal doses of alcohol seems to have motivated ordinary policemen to follow their deadly orders, though many did not like murdering helpless women and children. During this incredible killing spree in the winter of 1941–42, about 1.8 million Jews perished.37
With Operation Reinhard mass killing shifted to extermination camps, establishing a new form of assembly-line murder. In January 1942 the Wannsee Conference of SS and government leaders discussed plans for a comprehensive solution to the “Jewish question in Europe.” On Himmler’s personal orders new killing camps were established in Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, all located in eastern Poland in wooded areas at the end of railroad spurs. Regularly trains with cattle cars would bring new victims; the able-bodied might be selected to work, but the rest would be forced to undress, stripped of valuables, and marched into “delousing showers,” where they were killed by inhaling Zyklon B gas. After twenty-five to thirty minutes their desperate cries and struggles would cease and the bodies be cleared out and thrown into mass graves or burned in special crematoriums. Over time, this terrible “special treatment” was perfected so that it took only several dozen SS personnel, local guards, and Jewish work details to accomplish the killing. In this merciless manner the East European ghettos were emptied and an additional two million Jews murdered.38
In a letter to his family of August 1945 the Belgian survivor Charles Katzengold has left a graphic account of such an ordeal. Caught as a resistance operative in October 1941, he was deported to “the famous concentration camp Auschwitz.” Stripped of his belongings and hair, he was tattooed on his left arm and brutally beaten on his arrival, thereby “beginning to learn the other side of existence.” The camp leader left no doubt about their fate: “Jews you have not come here to live but to die.” In Birkenau, a subcamp within Auschwitz, he was forced to build barracks and dig ditches under “absolutely inhumane conditions.” Harassed by vermin, lacking water, and continually beaten, his fellow prisoners perished like “snow in the sun.” Since he knew various languages, he was fortunate enough to be selected as a secretary for the camp administration, but typhus reduced him to “a living skeleton” weighing less than fifty kilos. His situation improved somewhat when he became a camp guard (kapo), receiving better food and clothing. But with the approach of the Red Army he was sent on a death march for seven hundred kilometers on foot in the middle of the winter, which only 122 of the six thousand prisoners survived. In Auschwitz “men, women, children, all went to the gas chamber, and rare, very rare were those who came back.”39 Such individual testimonies, written immediately after liberation, are irrefutable evidence of the mass murder of the Jews.
Though most notorious, Auschwitz was rather an exception, since it had already opened in the spring of 1940 and combined several purposes. Located in territory annexed to the Reich, the Stammlager, based on military barracks, was initially a prison for Polish opponents and Russian POWs. The huge addition of Birkenau was the actual extermination site, where Jews were brought in from all over Europe to be killed by poison gas. The third complex, Buna-Monowitz, was a large work camp with forty-eight outposts in which inmates labored for German firms like the synthetic gas producer IG Farben. About 90 percent of the roughly 1.1 million people who were murdered in Auschwitz were Jews. With impending defeat, the SS tried to cover the traces of its crime, sending the inmates on death marches before the Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945.40 Unlike the victims of the pure killing camps, some writers like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Tadeuz Borowski managed to survive this hell and leave shocking portrayals of the brutality of the SS guards, the corruption of the kapos, and the suffering of the inmates. “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even these crematoria.”41
The medical experimentation performed in concentration camps on helpless inmates without their consent was especially revolting. Physicians proved quite susceptible to Nazi ideology, because their eugenic notions overlapped with racial biopolitics. Moreover, the armed forces were interested in testing exposure to cold, immersion in seawater, high-altitude responses, the impact of injuries, and amputation or transplantation methods on actual subjects in order to develop measures to protect their own troops. Some Nazified doctors were only too glad to undertake such “research,” since the KZ inmates were human material that could not protest the pain, disfigurement, and death visited upon them. Most notorious was Dr. Mengele of Auschwitz, who conducted almost fifteen hundred twin experiments on Romani (Gypsy) children, injecting them with dyes to change their eye color, sewing them together, and so on. Since the results of such horrific studies were reported in journals, the professional leadership was complicit in such science run amok. This reversal of the Hippocratic Oath transformed humane healing into medical torture.42
In spite of instances of heroic resistance, it was the compliance of most victims that made the final solution possible. The majority of Jews failed to fight against their impending destruction because they hoped to survive by following orders, while they were certain to die if they did not. Of course, widespread intimidation by the SS, its auxiliaries, and the Wehrmacht made opposition seem pointless. Moreover, to facilitate deportation to the camps, the Nazis used deception in promising resettlement, work opportunities, and medical treatment. The hostility of the local populations and the indifference of German soldiers also rendered trying to find and join the resistance difficult. And there was always the hope that by cooperating as a member of a Judenrat, kapo, or part of a special assignment within the camp like Irmgard Mueller one might see another day. But in truth all too few fortunate individuals who succeeded in joining the partisans or were hidden by Christian families were ultimately able to survive.43 Given this horrible situation, the courage of the participants in the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, some concentration-camp revolts, and the partisan struggle was therefore truly admirable.44
The genocide of Jews, this Holocaust, or Shoah, was therefore the result of a fanatical anti-Semitic crusade, escalating from discrimination via ghettoization to extermination. According to the count of the Nuremberg Tribunal, substantiated by more recent research, the Nazis and their local auxiliaries killed just under six million Jews, approximately two-thirds of the roughly nine million in occupied Europe who did not manage to escape.45 This Holocaust went beyond ethnic cleansing for Lebensraum, since it included the Jews from western countries like France and Holland. The Shoah was also singular because the SS tried not just to reduce but to eradicate an entire racially defined group. Hitler’s fanatical Judeophobia exceeded all rational calculations, because devoting considerable resources to the elimination of racial enemies that might have been employed as slave labor even appeared counterproductive to the war effort.46 While being part of the general drive to create a Greater German Empire through eastern settlement, “the final solution of the Jewish question” ultimately became an ideological end in itself, rupturing all civilized bonds.
PERPETRATORS, COLLABORATORS, AND RESISTERS
The implementation of ethnic cleansing and genocide required hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of willing helpers from Germany and all over Europe. In order to minimize their own participation, many collaborators afterward put the blame on Hitler and his henchmen, the SS or the NSDAP, a strategy that facilitated the reintegration of most collaborators into postwar society. While some claimed to have followed “superior orders,” others asserted merely to have “done their duty,” while yet others argued that they had only “tried to survive” themselves. Yet the exonerative strategy of stating “we did not really know” about the Nazi crimes remains unconvincing, because the disappearance of Jewish neighbors, the existence of concentration camps, the eastern settlement schemes, and the perpetration of war crimes were common knowledge, even if the full extent of the Holocaust remained shrouded in secrecy. The popular preference for not really wanting to know and the willingness to continue to function within the Nazi universe remains hard to explain in retrospect.47
On one end of the spectrum were the fanatical National Socialist activists who admired the Führer and believed in the murky ideology of the movement. Many of these, like the lawyer Roland Freisler, were Old Fighters who had joined the party out of conviction before 1933, when it was still problematic to be considered a Nazi. Though some even rose to the rank of gauleiter, these ideologues and thugs were increasingly replaced by the new SS elite of technocrats with academic training such as Werner Best, who were competent professionals and ruthless anti-Semites at the same time. Members of this “uncompromising generation” had embraced the National Socialist movement during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic and thought of themselves as the masters of a New Europe, dominated by the Greater German Reich.48 In other countries, many rightist youths also flocked to the fascist banners, seeing Hitler and Mussolini as dynamic leaders of the future. Even if their intense nationalism made the creation of a “Fascist International” difficult, they were willing to aid the racial cleansing of their countries, hoping to carve out a leading role in Nazi Europe.
Less rabid, but still crucial, was the complicity of nationalists or opportunists, since their expertise kept the war effort going. Even if they were disdainful of Nazi excesses, many lawyers, professors, and engineers continued to put their knowledge at the service of the Third Reich because they believed in a Greater Germany. Diplomats like Ernst von Weizsäcker, generals like Erwin Rommel, and conductors like Wilhelm Furtwängler were willing to collaborate and provide a respectable front for a disreputable regime. Once the likes of philosopher Martin Heidegger or the writer Ernst Jünger had endorsed Hitler’s dictatorship, their subsequent second thoughts could no longer undo the damage. Similarly, scores of opportunists also jumped onto the Nazi bandwagon as long as it rolled victoriously along. The hope of acquiring Jewish businesses, gaining occupation loot, or exploiting conquered resources drew many industrialists such as Alfried Krupp and Friedrich Flick into working for the Third Reich. But when battlefield defeats and Allied bombing suggested that the war was lost, it was too late to repent; they were trapped.49
The apolitical majority of the population in the Third Reich and occupied Europe simply tried to lead a normal life under abnormal circumstances, remaining preoccupied with their private affairs. Concretely that meant doing one’s job within the Nazi system as well as one could without running afoul of the little dictators, such as the Blockwart of one’s street or the party representative in one’s firm. Assuring survival also required nominal concessions like paying dues to National Socialist professional associations, donating during collections for the Winter Aid, sending children to the Hitler Youth, or displaying enthusiasm at a political rally. One might even try to take advantage of some Nazi entertainment or Labor Front vacation offers. At the same time, such conformists could tell Hitler jokes or ridicule the SA thugs in private so as to keep their emotional distance from the boorish Brownshirts. Though the “reluctant loyalty” of the majority never ran very deep, its surface compliance sufficed to keep the war effort going and allowed the Nazis to pursue their murderous dreams.50
Some groups within Germany and citizens in occupied countries proved more impervious to Nazi ideology and practice, as suggested by the concept of Resistenz. Catholics traditionally lived in a church-dominated subculture, which was authoritarian and patriotic but, like Bishop Clemens von Galen, rejected the secularism of the National Socialists. While many Protestants sympathized with the Nazi-inspired German Christians, a substantial minority followed Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the teachings of the “Confessing Church,” which rejected the Germanic neopaganism of the regime. Similarly, the dissolution of the trade unions could compel workers to join the German Labor Front, but it was unable to eradicate Marxist solidarity toward the multiple victims of the system. Though some young women fraternized with Wehrmacht soldiers, most of the people in occupied countries hated not just the Nazis but resented all Germans as overlords. Even when skeptics did not dare engage in open acts of defiance, an attitude of noncompliance, such as listening to the BBC, kept alternate views alive in spite of Gestapo control.51
Active resistance was a courageous choice that involved risking one’s life, since it required a strong commitment to humanistic values that rejected Nazi repression and genocide. In the occupied countries increasing numbers of nationalists and communists engaged in sabotage and partisan warfare. Encouraged by the Free French, an underground maquis, for instance, attacked German outposts and helped the D-Day invasion with intelligence. While Russian and Yugoslav partisans troubled German supply lines, the most spectacular effort was the uprising of the Polish Home Army, which tried to liberate Warsaw in August 1944 but was betrayed by the Red Army.52 Within Germany, it was difficult to stand up to the regime as long as Hitler kept winning. But impending defeat and knowledge of atrocities eventually inspired some conservative officers and politicians to attempt to overthrow the National Socialist dictatorship. Unfortunately the bombing attack, carried out by Klaus Schenk von Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944, failed to kill the Führer, leading to the death of thousands of conspirators in retribution.53 Such resistance was a heroic demonstration of morality, but it alone could not bring the Nazis down.
MURDEROUS MODERNITY
The brutality of the Holocaust, broadly defined, poses a fundamental challenge to the Western master narrative that views modernization as a civilizing process. If since the Middle Ages Europeans had been progressing toward a reduction of violence, as Norbert Elias has argued, the sudden relapse into utter barbarity during the Nazi dictatorship is hard to explain. In order to maintain the optimistic Whig interpretation of ineluctable progress, democratic intellectuals have tended to claim that the Germans deviated from this liberal development, following a special path in an antimodern direction. But the Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has challenged this self-exculpatory view, which understates Western imperialist crimes; instead, he claims that “the historical study of the Holocaust has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Nazi-perpetrated genocide was a legitimate outcome of rational bureaucratic culture.” By producing a sense of “moral indifference” among the perpetrators and conferring “moral invisibility” on the victims, modernity itself was to blame: “Both creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of what we call civilization.”54
In order to resolve this paradox, it is necessary to stop treating the Holocaust as metahistorical morality tale and to reinsert it into its actual historical setting. Hitler unleashed his wars of aggression primarily as an effort to gain hegemony over the European continent in order to strengthen Germany’s base for global competition. The ensuing mass murder of civilians was the result of Nazi dreams of eastern settlement, which required the ethnic cleansing of the existing residents so as to create space for German colonists. The persecution of millions of Jews caught in ghettos and concentration camps stemmed moreover from a post-Jewish-emancipation form of racial anti-Semitism which, by arguing biologically, cut off any escape by religious conversion or sociocultural assimilation. Finally, the ideological war of annihilation against communism and the Soviet Union facilitated mass killing because the savagery of the fighting ruptured all moral restrains. By involving local auxiliaries and extending into the Balkans, the Nazi campaign of mass murder interwove these three separate strands in a more complex fashion than is commonly remembered.55
Many aspects of the Nazis’ orgy of destruction had, indeed, antimodern overtones in intention as well as in practice, supporting the interpretation that the Holocaust was a terrible reversion to ancient barbarism. Much of the cultural energy of National Socialism stemmed from a rejection of decadence that was symbolized by Weimar’s experimental, urban modernity. At the same time the cult of violence and male bonding, derived from the Great War, invoked images of Germanic tribalism and medieval knighthood so as to constitute a new racial elite. Moreover, the entire project of agrarian settlement in the East was based on a romantic and anti-industrial understanding of national power as directly issuing from “blood and soil.” The racist prejudice against Slavs and the hatred of Jews had ancient roots that appealed to irrational feelings of German superiority and revived anti-Semitic fears of ritual murder. Finally, the initial method of killing by bullets was a rather primitive form of butchery. All such aspects suggest that the National Socialist repudiation of the standards of civilization must have been a murderous relapse into barbarism.56
Yet other, even more important indicators demonstrate that the mass killing of Poles, Jews, and communists was part and parcel of the Nazis’ effort to construct an alternate, organic form of modernity. The persecution of ideological and racial enemies within and without was the result of a massive propaganda effort that desensitized perpetrators and dehumanized potential victims. At the same time, the form of assembly-line killing in the extermination camps with the sequence of cattle cars, selection, undressing, and poison gas had an almost Fordist quality, possible only in an industrialized century. Moreover, the systematic organization of discrimination, persecution, and extermination, supervised by such deskbound killers as Adolf Eichmann, required an elaborate bureaucracy to plan each step. The academic support by scholars involved in Jewish research or doctors conducting experiments on human subjects was another aspect of quasi rationality. Finally, the genocidal effort of ethnic cleansing and racial purification was one of those great social engineering projects conceivable only with the hubris of an age infatuated by ideology.57
This frightening modernity of the Holocaust reveals a fundamental rupture of civilization that contradicts optimistic expectations of continued progress. The ideologies of nationalism, racism, and fascism so callously dehumanized Poles, Jews, and communists that they became mere numbers that could simply be erased.58 Even such an advocate of the civilizing process as Norbert Elias was forced to admit that “the highly organized and scientifically planned extermination of whole population groups … does not appear to be entirely out of place in highly technicized mass societies.” While wholesale murder has a long history beginning with the ancient Assyrians, the Nazi ethnic cleansing, racist genocide, and political violence added another, even more lethal chapter due to its technical tools, bureaucratic methods, and ideological goals. Instead of bringing continued progress, the modern condition now threatened the very survival of humanity with its unprecedented capacity for murder.59 Though the courageous resister Sophie Scholl of the White Rose represents the humane values of progress, the ruthless Auschwitz killer Rudolf Höß typifies more clearly the murderous potential of modernity.